"Run," Spinel shrieked, and Buffy ran. Around her the mad cityscape burst into frantic activity as demons of all sorts erupted in screams and roars and violent struggle. The green glow of her caste mark-she had been practicing all morning at Cyan's behest-only seemed to alarm those beings who caught sight of it.

"What's happening?" She needed to sleep more. If she slept, she could see the future in her dreams. But since learning that she could live without sleep, Buffy had spent fewer and fewer nights dreaming. Her dreams were always nightmares of one sort or another, and she never had time to waste on anything but practice these days.

"Kalmanka, the Arrow Wind," Dharma shouted over the din. "She carries razors and arrowheads in her grip and flays whoever she catches. She must've erupted through a tunnel; we usually see her coming further away."

"She?" Buffy held hands with Dharma and Spinel and let the others cling to her. She could get away faster by shoving through the milling mass of demon flesh, except she didn't know where she needed to go. "The wind is a she?"

"Adorjan's daughter," shouted Spinel. "Three stayed mortal, four became winds. May we please explain later?"

"She's not supposed to come this near the Conventicle," Aphrodisa yelled. "I have no idea why she'd be here!"

Buffy tried to see the Conventicle through the horrific press of bodies. Spires and towers rose here and there, but amid the chaos it was impossible to tell what building was which. Think! There's a way out of this. Think! No demons would be allowed into the Conventicle without an Exalted, or at least a token marking them as part of one's entourage. Kalmanka shouldn't be able to enter either, or so Buffy hoped. But that would mean there was no one heading for the great arena, either, so she would have to cut across the crowds.

"Dharma, Spinel, on my back!" She hefted the two demon girls up, one with each arm. "Aphrodisia, you're on top of them. Hang on tight." Finally she seized Marzi and Larimar by the waists. "Don't let go, no matter what."

The greatest mass of demons was headed left, away from the Conventicle. She could try to shove her way through them, but right now she was embedded in a pack of teodozjia; it could be done, but it might not be worth the effort or the time. Instead, Buffy turned, joining the thundering rush.

"Buffy, what are we doing?" Aphrodisia was most willing to question her, especially since the Venom incident.

"I have to get up to speed!" Racing along parallel to the teodozjia, Buffy leapt onto the nearest back, spun, and began dashing the other way. Inevitably the flow tried to carry her away from the Conventicle, but she was faster. She had to be. A great cloud of blades was rising over the Conventicle's roof, and if she didn't reach it soon they'd have to find some other reliable shelter-if one existed.

She was leaping from head to head now, racing over the shoulders of smaller demons. Even if she had wanted to, there was nothing she could do to help them all. At least, nothing she knew of could stand up to a wind. The frantic rush the other way was slowing her perceptibly. With an immense effort, she poured on the speed, burning through power. "Coming through! Hey, I can get you inside! This way! Move it!"

No use. If they heard her, they were too panicked to listen. Abruptly Buffy found herself barreling straight for an immense anuhle, towering on spindly legs above the crowd, but with its body low enough to block her path. "Hang on, girls!" She could feel them shifting, clinging to each other as well as to her. One last stride on the back of a confused tomescu, and Buffy leapt into the air, trailing shimmering green light as her feet just cleared the spider-demon's back.

She came down atop the Conventicle, feet slamming against the immense nerve nexus that collected Ligier's green light. Scattered obsidian razors clattered against the metal roof alongside her, and Marzi screamed as one of them slashed her arm. Too far, much too far, but the alternative had been to slam into the spider's belly. Buffy turned again, turned on a dime, and began to run down the side of the great building. At least there was no one blocking her path now, but razors and arrowheads and even larger blades were starting to arc in her direction.

What was she supposed to do with no arms free? No, she couldn't think that way. Cyan had been drilling that into her all morning. The only way to ask that question was in all seriousness: what could she do to block or avoid those blades? Because there was no question that she could. "Dharma, Spinel, raise your arms like you're gonna do a cartwheel. Aphrodisia, hang on to them and let Marzi and Larimar hold your legs. I've got them."

"What are we doing?" Larimar asked. She was crying. Must be certain she was going to die. Blades were descending on them like a great flock of ravens.

"Welcome to the world of group acrobatics." Buffy dug deep for more power and let herself tilt forward. Suddenly they were doing a cartwheel, all of them together, with Dharma and Spinel holding them up, leaving Buffy's legs free. Green flame flared around her, shining past the girls as they clung to her. "No one's dying on my watch until I say so! We clear on that, girls?"

No time for an answer as her feet came back down. Arrows and assorted blades were descending on them, but as their roll picked up speed the projectiles were briefly left behind, raining down on the Conventicle roof behind them. The few scattered razors that flew toward them she kicked away easily, now that her feet were free. They were, however, hurtling toward the great basalt plaza below at an unbelievable speed.

Dharma shrieked as she lost her grip and went flying, but they were only a yard or so from the bottom and the demon slammed harmlessly into the pavement. The torus of stone irised slowly open for Buffy. And as it did so, a thousand screaming blades arced toward them, making one last furious barrage, as if Kalmanka were aware of their impending escape. For all Buffy knew, maybe she was.

Digging deep, burning the strength she had always kept in reserve, Buffy hurled the four neomah she still carried through the portal. She seized Dharma by the leg-"Sorry!"-and spun, thrusting her inside.

The door had taken at least three seconds to open fully. It would take as long again to close, and who knew how many blades would fly through in that time. Maybe even Kalmanka herself. Buffy spun back to face the Arrow Wind. She would stand against it or she would die trying.

A dozen arrows struck her in the chest before she could move...and bounded away in a shower of sparks. Razors assailed her arms, flying daggers her legs, but Buffy suffered not so much as a scratch, though tiny bits of brass flew from the impacts. She gave way just slowly enough to let the door close with her inside, making it undeniably plain that she was not retreating, only entering because she had already chosen to do so and could not be swayed. A great shriek that was not her own, a yowl like that of a great cat, howled around her as a swirling cloud of tarnish-green and brassy yellow sprang up within her aura.

A greatsword of black steel flew at Buffy's neck. She must not-she would not-she chose not to flinch. In this moment, she could withstand anything.

The edge of the sword struck her at full tilt and rebounded, flinging shavings of glowing brass in all directions. It struck the nearly-closed door and clattered to the floor.

Gasping as if she had run a dozen marathons, Buffy began to sink to her knees. It was Aphrodisia who held her up. "My liege," she said. "Show no weakness. We are yours, and you chose to save us. Girls," she finished, using Buffy's most frequent form of address.

Between them, they lifted Buffy and bore her into her townhouse, sitting triumphantly on their shoulders, shining in her banner of wind and storm.

In her head, fury pounded, and if Buffy listened carefully, she almost thought she might hear words.

Chapter 12 - To Live In the Action of Death

Fred picked her way around the carcass, a huge/tiny shell of another roach that had passed this way long before. Had it not been for the metal sliver on the conduit floor next to its jaws, she might have taken the roach for a natural animal that had managed to come this far by chance.

No. Someone had tried this before.

There was no bug zapper grid here. That had been her first thought. She had bypassed those and several mechanical traps with difficulty. Angling her head back and forth, she made out the tiny nozzles that would release toxic spray. The question was now: was this a chance failure, or had the Lunars who ruled this underwater realm detected a previous attempt and put a more thorough security system into place?

With immense care she picked her way around the chamber, just high enough for her to creep through but two-dimensionally broad. There. A grid of thin wires. She could not fly over it. She would have to avoid stepping on any of them or release the gas.

How far had she gotten into the system? How far did she still have to go?

Clenching her mandibles, she dismissed the question and pressed on.

"Let's be clear on this, Anya," said Crimson Banner Executioner. "I understand your desire to take care of your friends. We're going to accomodate you on this, for the moment." He glanced in Iron Siaka's direction; she was personally apologizing to the Perfect, who stood with a raised eyebrow, staring at the vagabonds she had brought straggling into the palace. "But mortals have no rights in Yu-Shan except during the Carnival of Meeting, and Heaven is not the utopia you seem to be expecting. Your friends are there on your sufferance and under your responsibility. If they make any kind of trouble-and be sure that some gods will argue they are making trouble just by being there-you can be audited. That mean anything to you?"

Anya took a satisfyingly deep breath, her eyes wide, and nodded. "Audits are horrible. I've killed more men than I've inflicted audits on. It's a fate worse than death."

Crimson tried not to look dumbfounded by this. It was an appropriate level of respect, at least. How had she inflicted audits on anyone, and did she really see them as worse than death? Hmm. Well, perhaps she had a point. "You'll be assigned quarters-I would suspect fairly nice quarters for a new Exalt, and we'll get to that later-to which I suggest you should confine your friends until it's time to leave. If you've got to do this, I advise you to find a nice place for them to live in Creation and send them there. Permanently. There are more reasons, and we'll discuss them in private. Any questions?"

"What about Xander?" Anya's expression was difficult to read. She clearly wanted this "Xander" with her, and yet...

Crimson dropped his voice to a whisper. "If your boyfriend really is a Solar Exalt, then he does have rights in Yu-Shan. That does not mean it is a good idea to bring him there. The gods likely would welcome him, by and large. Most Sidereals will not. And that's all I'm going to say on the subject right now. Same goes for Fred and especially this Buffy...whatever she is." Truthfully he suspected this "Infernal Exalt" was probably an akuma and would have to be put down at the earliest opportunity. Of course, if she were a Solar akuma, that might be hard enough to take some time. "Also, I have to advise you to leave these two...'vanpires'...here. Demons are not allowed, to put it bluntly. If any demons have ever entered Yu-Shan, other than perhaps caged and chained, I'm not aware of it."

"I'll talk it over with them," Anya said truculently. "I wouldn't want them hurt." She had hinted at having been a demon herself for most of her lifespan, which might be technically feasible but sounded terribly unlikely. In any case, she was definitely human now, or she couldn't have Exalted. Whatever the truth, he intended to keep an eye on her. If she was demon-blooded or some such, then she might be a Malfean plot despite her Exaltation.

Iron Siaka strolled back over. "We had to pay a fine. Mortal money and all that. The bigwigs will probably cover our asses this time. Let's just hope we don't have any gods filing charges on the other side. They coming with?"

"Leaving the demons behind," Crimson said firmly. "She insists on the others, though."

"You told her the score, then?" Crimson gave her a shrug and a nod. "Up to her, I guess. Anya, we're ready to go. Are you?"

"I need to talk to Angel and Spike first."

"Go on, then." Iron Siaka gave her a gentle push on the shoulder. Hopefully she wasn't sweet on this one. Anya seemed especially devoted to her boyfriend, to the point he couldn't imagine her in the Bronze Faction. "You explain to her about our arcane fate yet?"

"Couldn't get her far enough away from her friends." Well, sooner or later there was a good chance that would take care of itself. Alternately, if she got them set up somewhere she could use them as a base to start developing contacts. "I hope she gets a handle on this quickly. I don't really want to see her audited. The idea seems to terrify her, which is appropriate but...strange."

"Yeah. How the hell's she know what an audit is, anyway?"

"You've got me."

The creature in front of Fred resembled an insect in most respects, but it had ten legs. That was clue enough, though it didn't tell her what kind of being it was. A mutated creature from the Wyld, a demon, even a god. She'd been forced to retreat and look for information.

It lifted its front legs, revealing a pair of nasty blades. There was no possible way she could do battle with it in this form. Therefore she had no intention of doing so. Instead, she placed a tiny slip of paper on the floor in front of it. The being she faced was called a sesselja, and it craved impure substances. They weren't really ideal guardians, but in a tiny space like this not much else would fit, and anyway, being this small made you vulnerable.

The demon touched the paper, tasting it and the alcohol it had been impregnated with. Fred held up a second slip. This one was dry, but she had written in tiny letters in Old Realm: "I have more."

The sesselja had been bound to stay here and guard. It only skittered back and forth. Fred stayed carefully out of its way. Apparently, though, alcohol qualified as an impure substance. She really did have a bottle of beer stashed outside.

Now...and here came the ironic part...she had to tempt it.

Rupert Giles was beginning to recognize that something was up.

Of course, he was aware of the grandeur that was Yu-Shan. The sparkling palaces that actually did almost touch the sky, the flying vehicle pods, the radiance of many of the inhabitants, the glimmering canals-who could fail to miss these things? It certainly made him wonder why no texts spoke of this. Judging by the attitudes of the Exalted who had come to collect Anya, this heaven was no less a threat than hell.

He was a practical man, however, and he remembered to keep his eye on the small details. The same Celestial lions that had growled just at seeing Spike and Angel down the long hallway had sniffed curiously and uncomfortably at Dawn. Dawn had hidden from the Maiden instead of trying to fight, even when Cordelia had been emptying Wesley's pistol and Anya had risked her life. He also knew that Dawn-human though she appeared-was a being created from a very inhuman power. She claimed to have no special abilities once the portal had been closed, yet she had been able to help Fred work out how to open the portal that led them here to find Buffy.

Was it possible that she was lying? Or even that she had powers she had forgotten when her current identity had been forged? Their own memories could not be presumed reliable around her. Of course, she had never tried to harm any of them. As far as he remembered, at least.

And if she wasn't truly human...what was she? Glory had been a god-supposedly, at least. But they had already confronted the idea that texts from home might not define a god in the same way as the people of Creation did. Few of the deities that surrounded them were anywhere near the almighty power Glorificus had claimed to have at home. Was she like this world's sun and moon? Or could she be an aspect of one of these Primordials? Or something alien to Creation entirely? And in any case, that didn't really answer his questions about Dawn; Glory could be a god who had found a way to bind a demon, or vice versa, or none of the above.

It was so easy to forget all this, because everything she had been had been subsumed into the role of being Buffy's sister. They could have encountered her many times before, for all he knew, and they'd never have connected her with those meetings, if they remembered them at all.

Iron Siaka interrupted his reverie as a tiny winged infant-a cherub? was this a joke?-flitted away from her. "This way, please. Anya, the Bier of Endings officials have arranged this apartment for you temporarily. It's a bit larger than average for a new Sidereal and even at that, I'm afraid it may be cramped for this number of guests. This is also not the best of neighborhoods; we're fairly near a slum, actually."

"A slum? In heaven? How's that work?" Gunn sounded annoyed but not all that surprised. Giles looked around and abruptly realized what he had missed in his surroundings. The glorious spires were elegantly built, but here trash had been thrown into the streets and unrestrained vines had overgrown much of the lower levels.

Crimson shrugged. "Lot of unemployed gods these days. The things they were gods of got destroyed in one of quite a few disasters. Lot of those these days too. Iron Siaka's got a point, though. I wouldn't go running around the streets if I were you."

"Yeah, yeah, been there, done that." Gunn affected a world-weary look, but Giles saw him mouth something like "God slums?" in disbelief. Giles wondered idly if Yu-Shan might be more appropriately classified as a hell-dimension as well. Many demon lords lived well, surrounded by suffering inferiors.

"Have you now?" Crimson fingered one of his swords irritably. "I'm sure the slums where you come from are very dangerous, but I doubt they contain any celestial deities. Even some very powerful beings have fallen on hard times here, though admittedly most homeless gods aren't much tougher than, say, a blood ape. Good luck taking on a blood ape by yourself, mortal. It's been done successfully, of course; I can find you epics on the subject, and a few of those are even true."

Wesley leaned over to whisper in his ear. "I wonder, is this because Anya is new, or is it to keep us from wandering about?" Giles just shook his head irritably. They could discuss that once their keepers were gone. Probably both were true.

He'd missed Anya asking something about the apartments. "Actually this building is mostly vacant," Iron Siaka said. "I'm kinda sorry about that. Lot of the place is just boarded up. I guess you could talk to the manager, if you can find her." She hastily added, "This way. Anya, you've got a meeting with your leader in about an hour or so. It'll take that long to get across town, so please let's get your friends settled."

Anya spread her hands. "Well, what're we waiting for?"

Abruptly Fred hit a wall. The air duct she was following went no further. Reluctantly, she backtracked and found another going in the same general direction, but this one, too, came to an end. There was only one thing for it, she realized; she was going to have to exit into the corridor.

A vent allowed her to crawl out into an immense ampitheater. No, she'd just been in the ducts too long. This was nothing more than the terminus of a hallway. Being a cockroach was starting to get to her. She couldn't get a good image of the doorway that led beyond here with her compound eyes. Hugging the walls, she crawled right up to the door before reverting. Inside her exoskeleton, flesh ballooned, stretching the segments until, a little painfully, they popped free. The good part about it was, her clothes helpfully materialized around her; they counted as part of her shape. Poor Buffy.

The door had no handle; it looked as if it was meant to slide into the walls. Set in the right panel of it was a keypad with the barely familiar sigils of this world's alphabet. Whatever magic had made them able to understand the most common language of Creation had kept them literate as well, but that didn't make the symbols look any less weird. Anyway, its importance was obvious-she needed a passcode. Given the security she'd faced so far just in the air ducts, there was probably a trap if she failed even once.

Fred released a small sigh. Back to the starting point again. Some of the security would stay shut off, but she already knew at least a third of the traps would be reset, or otherwise still need to be bypassed.

It had to be done.

"So is someone trying to kill me?"

Cyan glanced at Buffy and snickered. "You're in Malfeas, Buffy. Someone is almost certainly trying to kill you. But as regards your acrobatic performance this morning, I can think of no sorcery that could command the Arrow Wind. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but binding behemoths is extremely difficult, and Kalmanka lacks the sapience to be bargained with. If she's intelligent at all, it's on the level of an insect, I'd say."

"So it was a freak accident." Ugh. Buffy hated those.

"Not so freakish, Buffy, aside from its location. You have to understand that while we may share in its rule, this is hell. The five Malfean winds, the Ebon Dragon's shadow, Hegra's psychedelic rain, even the collapse of Malfeas' layers-these are facts of life here. And not even the Yozis can do much more than try to lure Adorjan's wind-daughters away from places they aren't wanted, for the reasons I mentioned earlier." Cyan's calm was infuriating. Of course, everything was infuriating to Buffy lately. Something was definitely wrong with her.

"All right. Why'd you ask me to visit, then?"

"Two reasons. The first...does this aura mean anything to you? The image was passed to me by a neomah-not one of yours, mind, one of mine. I think it was recorded by the Conventicle itself, which you'll remember is part of Malfeas' body just like all the rest." She handed Buffy a sheet of paper depicting her stand against Kalmanka in the Conventicle doorway. Buffy remembered that stormcloud aura.

"Never seen it before that. I...it's part of my anima banner, right?" She'd never used her powers to the extent of manifesting it before coming here. Maybe it was somehow connected to her problems?

"When you expend enough essence, sometimes the anima becomes what's known as 'iconic'. For us, that normally means we manifest the image of a demon, typically the one that carried our Exaltations. Occasionally it's another image of the Yozi who created that type of demon-this could in principle be Adorjan's winds, or Cecelyne's sandstorm. But that doesn't look quite right either. I'm wondering if it means anything to you."

Buffy shook her head. "Nothing I recognize. There was this one time I went on a sort of vision quest, and I saw a big cat. Something in my anima made a cat noise, or what sounded like one."

Cyan put the paper down without changing her expression. "I'm afraid that doesn't sound familiar. Sorry to bother you about it. Perhaps the Exaltation you carry was last touched by its demon so long ago that its form has been lost. Second matter: I have an intellectual question for you, part of your training. The best information we have suggests that even in the First Age, time travel was considered impossible, and travel to new, unknown worlds nearly so. Where do you think you come from?"

Buffy sat down without asking for permission. She needed to destress, and Cyan never seemed to mind. "The longer I'm here, the more certain I am that I'm from your future. Didn't you say that possibility was sort of a minor thing when it came to the Exalted?"

"Yes...but there was the impossible, and then there was the impossible. Even the ancient Solars never discovered some things-time travel, resurrecting the dead, controlling where an Exaltation went except in the most rudimentary sense." Cyan spread her hands. "So, if you came from the future...tell me how you think you got here. Wait, let me help by rephrasing that: you want to go home, I expect. To escape Creation and get back. The first thing you need to know to do that is where home is."

"I don't-" Actually, that seemed to help a lot. "Huh. Well, I can tell you where I'd go if I wanted to find the future. Into the Wyld."

"The Wyld? Seriously?"

"If the Wyld contains all possibility, the way the texts you gave me say, then all of history has to be there. History's possible, right? So every possible future and every possible past ought to be somewhere in the Wyld." That hadn't even made sense to her until she said it, but then it had just spilled out.

"Do you think you can find the right one? Will what you do here change it?"

That was more of a problem. Buffy put her elbows on the table and her jaw on her fists and thought. "Um. I don't think it will. At least, not in terms of getting back. Either we're still connected to our own future, or...and maybe this is if we change things too much...we're not connected to any particular future and we'll just end up wandering. There ought to be some kind of a link. I'll have to think about it some more. Maybe Dawn could help. She was the Key, after all." She'd never mentioned that before. Cyan sat up straight. "It's a long story. I'll tell you about it later."

"Buffy..." Suddenly she seemed to have piqued the older woman's interest.

"I said later, Cyan. Please. I need to go think." Something about Dawn. The pounding in her head... She needed to talk to her friends. No friends. Yes, yes, she did have friends! Damn it, why was that bothering her now? She'd beaten the spirit of the First Slayer and hadn't been bothered by her since.

No friends. No sister. Hunt. Hurt. Kill. Cyan was staring at her. Had she spoken out loud? "Cyan...I need to get out of here for a little while. Let me go. Now." Dawn was her sister, no matter how she'd come by her. She was! "I think I need to go kill something." Hurt something. Make it suffer before it dies.

This wasn't right. She didn't hear voices like this. Sometimes, every now and then, she knew things. She remembered things from previous Slayers. But she didn't hear the First Slayer's voice in her head. If she had always been there, if she was waking up...why now?

Cyan nodded at the door, and Buffy slammed it open and ran.

Dawn Summers was surrounded by friends, but she had never felt more alone. Anya's heavenly apartments were packed with every last human member of the Scoobies and Fang Gang who hadn't gotten spirited away. There were lots of comfy couches and seats-quite dusty, and one moldy one that had been shoved out to the street. There was a fridge with some basic food already stashed inside-not nearly enough. There was indoor plumbing, and a toilet! She could have cried for that.

"-can't believe they want us to stay cooped up in here." Cordelia was still freaking out about the neighborhood, and the size of the seven-room apartment.

"I don't see why we can't open up those boarded-up areas and see if they're livable," Gunn suggested. "I've lived in worse spots than that, even if they've got water damage or something."'

She ignored them. They were both missing the point: they weren't wanted here. Not that it was really any safer to be here than out in the desert. Homeless gods. What kind of a place was this, anyway? Gangs of roving gods. Yeah, some heaven. She wanted to go home. The little tug that told her what direction home was in had vanished when they went through the gates. At least she had felt the gates as she passed through them, and thought she would know if she ran across another.

"-think we can negotiate something with the local deities," Wesley suggested to Mr. Giles, who scoffed.

"All our Watchers' Council pacts are essentially null and void, Wesley, and we have nothing to offer them."

"As a matter of fact we do," Wes insisted. "We have access to Anya."

"Are you seriously suggesting we rent out Anya's time? We don't even know what kind of schedule she'll be required to keep!" Mr. Giles took off his glasses. If he was cleaning them over Wesley's ideas, he must be outright pissed.

Not that that tingle was very helpful. It hadn't pointed to the dimensional crack they'd squeezed through even right after they arrived. Home felt like it was elsewhere, like it was somewhere here, and there was no way that could be right.

She was never going to find out what it was that was calling her, not cooped up in here. Not just in this apartment. In Yu-Shan. In this stupid gilded fake heaven where gods lived in cardboard boxes on the streets. Everyone was still arguing.

"Going to the bathroom," Dawn called out-they had had to work out a rotation-and left the room. Only Cordy even noticed.

She slipped out the front door.

Three passcoded doors. Another dozen grids. Two more bug demons and a puddle of living acid. They were starting to run together, and that was very, very bad. Fred kept having to go back, to find a solution to a puzzle deeper and deeper in the corridor. Three more dead bugs, almost certainly previous attempts at what she was doing.

The only good thing about it was that the need to return kept her at other kinds of work, and in touch with her mentors. She had a dozen working Essence cannons now, and had set some pelagothropes-the lower-class, human-looking citizens-to fixing some of the simpler problems and mounting cannons on the hull. There was only one more problem she still hadn't figured out how to handle: bringing in Gavrane Tomazri. She had no idea how to approach him, or how to get him here to help her once she had him on board-so to speak.

Another door. Fred examined the keyboard one last time and tapped in the seemingly random sequence of symbols. She'd had to work this one out by shrinking down to bug size and examining the individual keys for wear and tear. Luckily the ancient Solar aesthetic didn't seem to have run to touchscreens.

The door recessed slightly and slid aside, opening on a great circular chamber. For a moment Fred thought she was a cockroach again and had forgotten she was inside the vent. But this room held seats and rails and all manner of dormant screens. "Captain on the bridge," she murmured to herself. Only she wasn't the captain, she was the Klingon intruder. At least there were no redshirts armed with phasers.

"How very, very wrong you are." With a little shriek, she spun, seizing a power tool from her belt.

Sage of the Depths had followed her.

On the Hellmouth, there were demons and there was the Slayer. She hunted them. She killed them. End of story. Not really end of story, though. She kept them from overrunning the world. She thwarted their plans. She kept them penned up. Buffy wasn't on the Hellmouth now. She wasn't in her world at all. She was in a hell dimension called Malfeas. Stumbling through the streets of the Conventicle, in the entertainment district now.

Somewhere in those confused thoughts there had to be an answer. Was the demon that had carried her Exaltation waking up because it was home? No, the others would know about that if it was the issue. Her thoughts just kept spinning round and round. Hurt them. Keep them down. Make them suffer forever.

It made no sense. Granted that the Yozis were insane, they still wanted out. In fact, they believed she was the one who would free them. How could they have loaded her down with the desire to hurt demons and keep them pinned in? Just to hurt her? But they had no idea who she was or where she'd come from, so how could they have set this up?

The Yozis wanted to control her. They were trying to keep her here in Malfeas. Or even just in Creation. She had to get out. She had to get out before this ate her alive. Think, damnit! Putting it to herself that way clarified things, but not as much as she would have wanted.

She kept passing demons. Trapped in here with her. They deserve it. Hateful, disgusting monsters. Betrayers. Keep them here, make sure they rot, make sure they hurt. The answer was in there, somewhere. But it was mad rambling. That didn't sound like the police, or the government, or even an army.

Her Exaltation didn't come from now. Or, it did, sort of, but a lot had happened between now and her. Things had changed. If she was fated to let the Yozis out, it hadn't happened. Maybe it was still in her future. But if she disappeared first, if she left them here now, they would feel...betrayed. Cheated. As if she were ungrateful for her power, not that she wanted it from them. So they had taken it...maybe had set it up to be The Slayer...knowing her future. Knowing that she would come back one day and fail them.

She was close to the answer, circling it. So close. Time travel. She would have thought that over such a long time, so many thousands of years, nothing she did would matter. That it might as well have been a separate dimension, even if it wasn't really. No one knew her here, not even the Yozis. But the Yozis would. Punishing her would do nothing to help them. It was hurting them this very moment. But they were nothing like humans, and they were insane, and they didn't care.

That wasn't quite right either. Only one of the Yozis had handled her Exaltation. She still needed to know which one had felt betrayed enough to screw her over-to screw itself over to punish her forever.

"Buffy?"

"Aphrodisia." She'd made it to her townhouse. Somehow. Hurt her, make her pay, make her suffer, now, forever, make her live in agony before she dies. Make her know she will never, never, nevernevernever be free. "Don't...don't be here. Go. Get away from me. Please." Buffy flailed a hand at her, trying to wave her away.

"Mistress, are you all right?" Instead of leaving as ordered, Aphrodisia stepped closer. Because Buffy had made her care, if only a little. Had treated her as a person instead of a thing to be used. Use her. Use her up. Take as long as you want. It's what she's for. It's all she's for. "Mistress, please tell me wha-"

Buffy had her on the floor, by the throat. "Just shut up! Shut up shut up! You're making me crazy just leave me alone!" She only needed one hand. The other fist rose up, feeling entirely out of her control. This...this thing had made her believe it was a person. Had made her like it, have fun with it, help it. Just like...just like...

Just like Dawn.

Buffy's hand unclenched, and she stood.. "Go. I'm sorry." The chaotic swirl of emotion in her head had frozen in an instant into perfect clarity. It wasn't Aphrodisia she wanted to hurt.

It was the thing pretending to be her sister.